I chose to read this book because the idea of firemen burning books instead of putting out fires is intriguing to me. That and how their world is almost the opposite of ours seemed fascinating.
The genre of Fahrenheit 451 is classified as science fiction and drama. The story is science fiction because of the weird futuristic events that occur, one example is that cars race extremely fast and all you can see is a blur. Another example is people not wanting to go outside and play, but instead they choose to stay inside and watch TV on a set that is as big as the wall. My favorite example for classifying this science fiction is the flying cars and the firemen with the fire proof suits. There are several key points that could be used to tell how this book is a drama. One key point would be the many deaths that occur in the story and most of the people who died in the book had a direct link with Montag, the main protagonist. For example, his wife tried to commit suicide on sleeping pills, but luckily Montag was there and called an ambulance. The key point that has the biggest impact on the story is when Montag was ordered to burn the library. The owner of the library decided she loved her books so much that she should jump into the fire so she could burn with her books. Guy Montag is a firefighter who lives in a lonely, isolated society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firefighters to burn any books on sight or said collections that have been reported by informants. People in this society including Montag's wife are drugged into compliancy and get their information from wall-length television screens. After Montag falls in love with book hoarding Clarisse, he begins to read confiscated books designated to be burned. Through this relationship, he begins to question the government's motives behind book burning. Montag is soon found out, and he must make a decision of whether to run or go back to his job knowing fully what the consequences would be. If caught, some of the severe consequences could imprisonment or even the death penalty.
Guy Montag is the main protagonist in the story with a futuristic setting where books are illegal. In my opinion, the world he lives in is much like that of the setting of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Guy being a man who follows and enforces the laws eventually has to make many decisions that break the law. He is your everyday fireman that enjoys burning books, but he meets a young girl named Clarisse and everything changes.
Clarisse is a seventeen year old young woman who walks with Montag on his trips home from work every day. She is an unusual sort of person in the bookless society because she is outgoing, naturally cheerful, and unusually intuitive. She is unpopular among her peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. She often skips school because she thinks it is a repetitive pointless routine. Clarisse convinces Montag that he is not in love with his wife, Mildred, whom Montag has been married to for ten years. This idea that he is not in love with his wife embarrasses him, and he tries to deny it, but inside he knows it is true. Only a short time after meeting Montag, Clarisse disappears without any explanation. Mildred along with Montag's his boss, Captain Beatty, claims she was killed in a car accident. Clarisse did not accept the values set forth for her by society, and she rarely took part in their activities. Her most hated event is jet car racing which appealed to the need for constant unthinking stimulation preferred by the majority. Clarisse was an individual who was in touch with her own soul, and she was capable of seeing the world around her as being abnormal and honestly evaluate its’ worth.
Captain Beatty is a bit of a hypocrite because he is the head fireman, but he is more knowledgeable about books than anyone else. He burns the books with a passion, but he also spends a great bit of time quoting from them. When he speaks it is often full of Biblical references. At one point, he stated to an elderly woman, “You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel.” Beatty once stated to Montag, “You think you can walk on water with your books.” At times he even quotes the Greek myth of Icarus. Captain Beatty is one of the most well-read maniacal book burners.
Plainness is one of the biggest themes for the book. The main point of burning books is to limit the creativity of society to make the jobs of the government rule much easier. The government owns the television and radio broadcast channels. This is one the reasons why people in the future have no desire to anything other than watch television or race cars. More broadly, Bradbury introduces the concept that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and advertisements creates a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to concentrate. After plainness, one of the other themes causing book burning is envy. People do not welcome feeling like they are inferior to those who have read more books than themselves. The novel implies the most important reason leading to censorship is the objections of special interest groups and minorities to ideas in books that offend them. Bradbury is careful to refrain from referring specifically to racial minorities. For instance, Beatty mentions dog and cat lovers instead of a specific race. The reader can only try to decide which special interest groups he really has in mind.Ray Bradbury wrote this novel so he could express why censorship is wrong for society. He believed the world would be a horrible place if books were to be banned, so he gave society an idea of what would happen if people began burning books to limit a free thinking society.
Another major conflict in this book is freedom of speech. The reason for the censorship is to keep the people at bay.The first amendment of the US Constitution is freedom of speech, and in Fahrenheit 451 there was no opportunity to express your point of view on any topic if it does not agree with the governments’. Censorship is displayed because most all books were illegal especially if someone was expressing their view point that does not agree with the government. It that case they would be silenced by varying methods.Montag displayed this when goes against the government reads illegal books. He rebelled against the government and kept hidden books to preserve them. At the core of the conflict is that Montag is an authority figure and he is breaking the law. This makes Montag a bit of a contradiction because he is a man who has burned so many books, and all of a sudden he decides that he needs to read books so that he can fight the good fight. This sudden love for books has made his life different causing him not to show love for his wife anymore. At this point, Captain Beatty and Montag’s wife began plotting to get his stash of books and burn them so that they could get Montag back to normal.
Anesthetized is a drug or process to be numbed to prevent pain or awareness. “He was afraid to get up, afraid he might not be able, with an anesthetized leg.”
Perpetual motion is when something starts moving, but doesn’t need anything like electricity or steam to keep it moving. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”
Cardamom. “He smelled the heavy musk like perfume mingled with blood and then gummed exhalation of the animal’s breath, all cardamom and moss and ragweed odor in this huge night where the trees ran at him, pulled away, ran, pulled away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes.”
Valise is a small piece of luggage. “They sealed cardboard valise with clear tape.”
Asbestos is a silicate mineral that was often used in walls and brakes. “Now the guild of the asbestos-weaver must open shop very soon.”
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth. The book illustrates the conflict between native Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. The stories were loosely woven together with a series of short publications. This book reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 because of the futuristic setting. 451
This picture has a relation to the story because the story is based on burning books. I drew this picture since the protagonist is always saying how he gets to stack the books up then sets the incinerator to 451 degrees Fahrenheit. I drew the books in different sizes to explain how Clarisse believed the different sized books you read the smarter you would be. The reason they are on fire is because it is Guys job to find the books and set them on fire. The reason I typed 451 is because that is the temperature that books burn. http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/430425918
Maze Runner By: James Dashner Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up in a place called the Glade, where towering walls close at night to keep a colony of boys safe from the monsters outside them. They have all had their memories erased, but Thomas remembers just a little too much. The world is in catastrophe and they are living in the Killzone, mere animals in a bizarre experiment. Soon Teresa, the first girl, arrives and tells them the game is on. Some boys think they are better off in this cruel place than going back to where they came from -- they have made a society after all, with laws and occupations like farming and even butchering their own meat. Thomas turns out to be the leader they've needed to form their own army, revolt against the monsters, and take on the people who have set them up in this very cruel and isolated world. Of course the outside world may have its own scary challenges.
Description of Three Importants Characters
Thomas: He's the newcomer to the place called the Glade, and the main character in the book.
Teresa: The only girl in the Glade. All of the guys have fallen in love with her especially Thomas the main character of the story.
Alby: Alby is the leader in the gladers. Alby is the one of the Gladers that explains the concept of the glade to Thomas. He along with Thomas and about every other boy in thebook are in love with Teresa
The amin conflict of this book is very similar to that of the Hunger Games. The gladers, which are a group of sixty boys that are led by Alby, have to fight for there lives every day in a concrete maze full of monster and animals that will kill them. Eventually Thomas gets stung by half machine and half animal monsters called Grievers. During this time Thomas is givin a syrum that will save his life and he has an extremly painful vision that tells him what his life was like before. the creators of the glade puposefully made the syrum so people got there memorys back after getiing stung, but what they didn't expects was Thomas to get most of his memorys back and remember the outside world. thomas calls a meeting when he wakes up and tells the people that the outside world is just one big kill zone. Thomas also adds that the only ways out of the maze is through griever holes which are what grievers use to get in and out of the maze. While most think it is a suicide mission Thomas and many other decide that they need to set out to leave the maze. When all the survivors come into the Hole, they head down a hallway, down a slide and find the Creators - the people who monitored them in the Maze - standing behind a glass wall in a lab. After a fight between Thomas and Gally, a group of civilians enter, shoot down the Creators with guns and take the surviving Gladers in a bus where they explain why all these events have been occurring.
Essential Quotes
" My name is Thomas, he thought That...that was the only thing he could remember about his life....he didn't know where he came from, or how he'd gotten inside the dark lift, or who his parents were. He didn't even know his last name."
“Shouldn't someone give a pep talk or something?" Minho asked before they ventured to the Griever Hole.
“If you ain’t scared… you ain’t human.” Alby told Thomas this when Thamas asked Alby if he was scared of Grievers.
“You’re disgusting when you eat,” Chuck told Thomas when he first got to the Glade
“Thomas hated the people who'd taken this poor, innocent kid form his family. He hated them with a passion he didn't know a human could feel. He wanted them dead, and tortured. He wanted Chuck to be happy. But happiness had been ripped form their lives. Love had been ripped from their lives.”
Main Theme
The main theme of the book is survival. Everyday for the gladers is a fight to survive. They have to make a community with jobs that rank from suicide mission to walk in the park. That is just an description of there everyday life.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
I chose to read this book because the idea of firemen burning books instead of putting out fires is intriguing to me. That and how their world is almost the opposite of ours seemed fascinating.
The genre of Fahrenheit 451 is classified as science fiction and drama. The story is science fiction because of the weird futuristic events that occur, one example is that cars race extremely fast and all you can see is a blur. Another example is people not wanting to go outside and play, but instead they choose to stay inside and watch TV on a set that is as big as the wall. My favorite example for classifying this science fiction is the flying cars and the firemen with the fire proof suits. There are several key points that could be used to tell how this book is a drama. One key point would be the many deaths that occur in the story and most of the people who died in the book had a direct link with Montag, the main protagonist. For example, his wife tried to commit suicide on sleeping pills, but luckily Montag was there and called an ambulance. The key point that has the biggest impact on the story is when Montag was ordered to burn the library. The owner of the library decided she loved her books so much that she should jump into the fire so she could burn with her books.
Guy Montag is a firefighter who lives in a lonely, isolated society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firefighters to burn any books on sight or said collections that have been reported by informants. People in this society including Montag's wife are drugged into compliancy and get their information from wall-length television screens. After Montag falls in love with book hoarding Clarisse, he begins to read confiscated books designated to be burned. Through this relationship, he begins to question the government's motives behind book burning. Montag is soon found out, and he must make a decision of whether to run or go back to his job knowing fully what the consequences would be. If caught, some of the severe consequences could imprisonment or even the death penalty.
Guy Montag is the main protagonist in the story with a futuristic setting where books are illegal. In my opinion, the world he lives in is much like that of the setting of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Guy being a man who follows and enforces the laws eventually has to make many decisions that break the law. He is your everyday fireman that enjoys burning books, but he meets a young girl named Clarisse and everything changes.
Clarisse is a seventeen year old young woman who walks with Montag on his trips home from work every day. She is an unusual sort of person in the bookless society because she is outgoing, naturally cheerful, and unusually intuitive. She is unpopular among her peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. She often skips school because she thinks it is a repetitive pointless routine. Clarisse convinces Montag that he is not in love with his wife, Mildred, whom Montag has been married to for ten years. This idea that he is not in love with his wife embarrasses him, and he tries to deny it, but inside he knows it is true. Only a short time after meeting Montag, Clarisse disappears without any explanation. Mildred along with Montag's his boss, Captain Beatty, claims she was killed in a car accident. Clarisse did not accept the values set forth for her by society, and she rarely took part in their activities. Her most hated event is jet car racing which appealed to the need for constant unthinking stimulation preferred by the majority. Clarisse was an individual who was in touch with her own soul, and she was capable of seeing the world around her as being abnormal and honestly evaluate its’ worth.
Captain Beatty is a bit of a hypocrite because he is the head fireman, but he is more knowledgeable about books than anyone else. He burns the books with a passion, but he also spends a great bit of time quoting from them. When he speaks it is often full of Biblical references. At one point, he stated to an elderly woman, “You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel.” Beatty once stated to Montag, “You think you can walk on water with your books.” At times he even quotes the Greek myth of Icarus. Captain Beatty is one of the most well-read maniacal book burners.
Plainness is one of the biggest themes for the book. The main point of burning books is to limit the creativity of society to make the jobs of the government rule much easier. The government owns the television and radio broadcast channels. This is one the reasons why people in the future have no desire to anything other than watch television or race cars. More broadly, Bradbury introduces the concept that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and advertisements creates a lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to concentrate. After plainness, one of the other themes causing book burning is envy. People do not welcome feeling like they are inferior to those who have read more books than themselves. The novel implies the most important reason leading to censorship is the objections of special interest groups and minorities to ideas in books that offend them. Bradbury is careful to refrain from referring specifically to racial minorities. For instance, Beatty mentions dog and cat lovers instead of a specific race. The reader can only try to decide which special interest groups he really has in mind.Ray Bradbury wrote this novel so he could express why censorship is wrong for society. He believed the world would be a horrible place if books were to be banned, so he gave society an idea of what would happen if people began burning books to limit a free thinking society.
Another major conflict in this book is freedom of speech. The reason for the censorship is to keep the people at bay.The first amendment of the US Constitution is freedom of speech, and in Fahrenheit 451 there was no opportunity to express your point of view on any topic if it does not agree with the governments’. Censorship is displayed because most all books were illegal especially if someone was expressing their view point that does not agree with the government. It that case they would be silenced by varying methods.Montag displayed this when goes against the government reads illegal books. He rebelled against the government and kept hidden books to preserve them. At the core of the conflict is that Montag is an authority figure and he is breaking the law. This makes Montag a bit of a contradiction because he is a man who has burned so many books, and all of a sudden he decides that he needs to read books so that he can fight the good fight. This sudden love for books has made his life different causing him not to show love for his wife anymore. At this point, Captain Beatty and Montag’s wife began plotting to get his stash of books and burn them so that they could get Montag back to normal.
- Anesthetized is a drug or process to be numbed to prevent pain or awareness. “He was afraid to get up, afraid he might not be able, with an anesthetized leg.”
- Perpetual motion is when something starts moving, but doesn’t need anything like electricity or steam to keep it moving. “It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”
- Cardamom. “He smelled the heavy musk like perfume mingled with blood and then gummed exhalation of the animal’s breath, all cardamom and moss and ragweed odor in this huge night where the trees ran at him, pulled away, ran, pulled away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes.”
- Valise is a small piece of luggage. “They sealed cardboard valise with clear tape.”
- Asbestos is a silicate mineral that was often used in walls and brakes. “Now the guild of the asbestos-weaver must open shop very soon.”
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth. The book illustrates the conflict between native Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. The stories were loosely woven together with a series of short publications. This book reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 because of the futuristic setting.451
This picture has a relation to the story because the story is based on burning books. I drew this picture since the protagonist is always saying how he gets to stack the books up then sets the incinerator to 451 degrees Fahrenheit. I drew the books in different sizes to explain how Clarisse believed the different sized books you read the smarter you would be. The reason they are on fire is because it is Guys job to find the books and set them on fire. The reason I typed 451 is because that is the temperature that books burn.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/430425918
Maze Runner
By: James Dashner
Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up in a place called the Glade, where towering walls close at night to keep a colony of boys safe from the monsters outside them. They have all had their memories erased, but Thomas remembers just a little too much. The world is in catastrophe and they are living in the Killzone, mere animals in a bizarre experiment. Soon Teresa, the first girl, arrives and tells them the game is on. Some boys think they are better off in this cruel place than going back to where they came from -- they have made a society after all, with laws and occupations like farming and even butchering their own meat. Thomas turns out to be the leader they've needed to form their own army, revolt against the monsters, and take on the people who have set them up in this very cruel and isolated world. Of course the outside world may have its own scary challenges.
Description of Three Importants Characters
Thomas: He's the newcomer to the place called the Glade, and the main character in the book.
Teresa: The only girl in the Glade. All of the guys have fallen in love with her especially Thomas the main character of the story.
Alby: Alby is the leader in the gladers. Alby is the one of the Gladers that explains the concept of the glade to Thomas. He along with Thomas and about every other boy in thebook are in love with Teresa
The amin conflict of this book is very similar to that of the Hunger Games. The gladers, which are a group of sixty boys that are led by Alby, have to fight for there lives every day in a concrete maze full of monster and animals that will kill them. Eventually Thomas gets stung by half machine and half animal monsters called Grievers. During this time Thomas is givin a syrum that will save his life and he has an extremly painful vision that tells him what his life was like before. the creators of the glade puposefully made the syrum so people got there memorys back after getiing stung, but what they didn't expects was Thomas to get most of his memorys back and remember the outside world. thomas calls a meeting when he wakes up and tells the people that the outside world is just one big kill zone. Thomas also adds that the only ways out of the maze is through griever holes which are what grievers use to get in and out of the maze. While most think it is a suicide mission Thomas and many other decide that they need to set out to leave the maze. When all the survivors come into the Hole, they head down a hallway, down a slide and find the Creators - the people who monitored them in the Maze - standing behind a glass wall in a lab. After a fight between Thomas and Gally, a group of civilians enter, shoot down the Creators with guns and take the surviving Gladers in a bus where they explain why all these events have been occurring.
Essential Quotes
" My name is Thomas, he thought That...that was the only thing he could remember about his life....he didn't know where he came from, or how he'd gotten inside the dark lift, or who his parents were. He didn't even know his last name."
“Shouldn't someone give a pep talk or something?" Minho asked before they ventured to the Griever Hole.
“If you ain’t scared… you ain’t human.” Alby told Thomas this when Thamas asked Alby if he was scared of Grievers.
“You’re disgusting when you eat,” Chuck told Thomas when he first got to the Glade
“Thomas hated the people who'd taken this poor, innocent kid form his family. He hated them with a passion he didn't know a human could feel. He wanted them dead, and tortured. He wanted Chuck to be happy. But happiness had been ripped form their lives. Love had been ripped from their lives.”
Main Theme
The main theme of the book is survival. Everyday for the gladers is a fight to survive. They have to make a community with jobs that rank from suicide mission to walk in the park. That is just an description of there everyday life.
Goodreads Review Link:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6186357-the-maze-runner
"I will Survive" Song by Gloria Gaynor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tth-8wA3PdY